Selkirk a timeless setting for time-travel tale
For filmmakers, Winnipeg and southern Manitoba have always enjoyed a time-warp quality that makes the province conducive to period films, going back to the late 19th century (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).
Director Hannah Macpherson did not have that challenge when, in the summer of 2021, she took on the helming duties of the sci-fi/horror film Time Cut, now screening on Netflix. The premise sees brilliant high school student Lucy (Madison Bailey) discovering a time machine and using it to travel back to the year 2004 to save the life of her sister Summer (Antonia Gentry) from a mysterious masked serial killer.
As often happens when a movie requires a small-town America setting, the city of Selkirk was chosen as a stand-in for many of the location shots.
ALLEN FRASER / NETFLIX
Director Hannah Macpherson on the set of Netflix film Time Cut, which was filmed in Selkirk
“Selkirk could be 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 80 years ago,” Macpherson says in a Zoom interview. “It gave us exactly what we needed because it’s timeless and you could put your own stamp on it for when it exists. But it was beautiful.”
The two-decade time differential manifests itself in other ways. Macpherson’s previous work, such as the 2016-18 web series T@gged, is also set in a high school milieu where students are falling prey to a violent maniac through their own social media profiles. Her 2016 haunted house film Sickhouse was actually created for Snapchat, and uploaded over five days to create the illusion it was happening in real time.
Time Cut takes social media out of the equation entirely, which allowed Macpherson to pay homage to her own teen years.
“T@gged is hugely about the perils of social media and oversharing for teenagers, and Sickhouse also fell right into that,” Macpherson says. “We were able to use Snapchat as an outlet to distribute a feature film that no one knew was fake.
“So it was refreshing, if I’m honest, that by travelling 20 years in the past for Time Cut, social media and phones basically went away,” she says. “I’m of an age that I could experience my teenage years without a phone or social media and I’m nostalgic about that time.
“It was a special time where you knew where your friends were because the bikes were piled up on the front lawn. You could be in the present more, which is really the point of the movie.”
Time Cut arrives at a time when women are making a mark on the genre: see the recent success of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance in addition to work by directors such as Rose Glass (Saint Maud) or Arkasha Stevenson (The First Omen, Channel Zero: Butcher’s Block). Macpherson says that door opening was long overdue.
“Women are huge horror fans, but also women experience horror on the daily and we have a lot of stories to tell that are horrifying,” she says.
“I love being scared. I’ve always loved horror movies. But unless they have some aspect of real grounded drama, they aren’t interesting. So for me, it’s the sister relationship that makes this movie matter.”
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